 Welcome back to the Venetian Conference Center here in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of HPE Discover. This is day two. I think this is probably the 12th or 13th year we've covered HPE and HPE Discover. We've been tracking the progress of the company, documenting it over the years. And we just had CEO Antonio Neary on. OpsRamp is a company that HPE just recently closed a deal on. They acquired the company to really drive some of that cross-cloud and hybrid activity, and we're going to get into that with Varma Kunaparaju, who's the co-founder and CEO of OpsRamp, of course now an HPE company, and Latha Vishnubotla, who's the chief platform officer at HPE. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. You're very welcome. All right Varma, let's start with you. I always like to ask founders why they started the company. So why did you start OpsRamp? About seven, eight years ago we saw this huge opportunity of infrastructure operations management being extremely complex between hybrid multi-clouds that the enterprises are using and the people to manage that infrastructure is no longer central IT ops. It is SRE, DevOps and tech ops. And if you look at the IT real estate and the people to manage that real estate no longer, they're no longer centralized. So we saw an opportunity to build a modern IT management platform based on the foundation that the infrastructure is going to be hybrid, based on the people to manage that infrastructure is not central IT, but maybe service providers and DevOps, tech ops, all of the channel ecosystem also participate. So we felt there is a tremendous opportunity to reinvent the operations management and that's how the foundation of the company. Great, thank you. That fits into the notion of a cloud operating model. So what was it about OpsRamp that attracted you? Why you bought the company? What gaps were you trying to fill? I mean, you always have a choice. We can build it ourselves. We can try to cobble together some existing IP. Why did you choose to purchase the company? Yeah, so we talked about HPE GreenLake, H2Cloud platform last year when I was here. We talked about how we are building services on top of the platform to give the ability to customers to do day zero, day one and day two activities across hybrid multi-cloud. So OpsRamp fits in the day two activity for operations and that is an area where we wanted to add and expand our portfolio. That's where we looked at OpsRamp and especially what attracted us to OpsRamp is ability to go multi-vendor. OpsRamp supports multi-vendor capability and it goes multi-cloud and also ability to discover, monitor and remediate using automation. This is the functionality every IT ops, every SRE is looking for and it was perfect fit to come on to the platform. And does OpsRamp do the translation between what the individual is using it sees and what's underneath the cloud covers or the on-prem covers? Is that, should we think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that complexity or is that something different? So it is able to, as I mentioned, it is able to discover and monitor the assets which are deployed on-prem and in the multi-cloud, full stack. So it can go networking, compute, storage, databases, VMs, containers, you name it. It can go full stack, both on-prem and in the multi-cloud as well. Yeah. So is this really, from a persona perspective, when you're out talking to customers, are you talking to platform engineering folks? Because as we see DevOps and SREs kind of coming together, it's almost like, you know, the developers are saying don't SRE me because they don't want to be on, you know, 24-7, 365. Is that really the people you see using this ops ramp is the more the platform engineering folks? Rob, you know, the answer is it's multiple people in the IT landscape can leverage the platform. It is not only the ops people, but let's start with the top of the pyramid, you know. If you look at the CIO and CTO of a large company, they're more and more business centric. They wanted to have a boardroom voice saying that this is how they are impacting the business, right? So to start with that, a CIO, CTO, they are the first to, they wanted to be the first to know. They wanted to understand how businesses are getting served by their IT organizations. So the platform has a persona, as an end user persona, at the top of the pyramid where each IT organization can expose how they're delivering the business services to the lines of business, that is at the top of the pyramid. From there, if you kind of peel the onion, go all the way to the infrastructure operations, from an instrumentation, observability, AI ops, and automation, entire IT real estate, as well as entire IT operations people, and SRE people can be the people who use the platform. So mention observability, and it's a topic that comes up a lot. People talk about full stack of observability. So it sounds like OpsRAMP is an observability platform, but more, right? So help us understand what it is, and what more than full stack observability, if you would. Very good question. So in any hybrid multi-cloud environment, the first order of magnitude for an enterprise IT is to get visibility into the entire real estate. So OpsRAMP provides the complete visibility from infrastructure all the way to the application by discovering all the estate. Then once you understand the real estate, one needs to create what is so-called observability, which is a combination of metrics, logs, and traces, to really instrument the entire IT estate. And then once the observability is coming in the form of an alert and event, being able to correlate and optimize the probable root cause out of all the understanding of the topology and based on that, finding that signal is an important piece, which tool vendors call AIOps, right? So that is one piece of the functionality, but what do you do once you know that probable root cause can self-remediate with an automation framework? That is what OpsRAMP provides. So it is beyond observability that AIOps capability and automation capability that brings in a single integrated stack. That's what the OpsRAMP provides. Okay, so you could take action, is what you're saying, assuming the people, the customer trusts it. That's always an interesting equation. So how do you see that playing out, right? Does it sort of first expose it to the human in the loop, let them be the judge, and then once they become comfortable, then you can fully automate it? Is that how you see it playing out? Yeah, exactly. So when you expose it, they have an option to go and click a button and say, okay, I see it. I know what's the issue. I know how it can be fixed. Click a button and get it automatically fixed, or they can pause it, take a, perhaps set it up for a later on time to go and fix it. So all those are possible with that kind of automation. Yeah, and I think there's always the aspect, and I think it's been a very good drumbeat of sustainability throughout. And I think especially with AI and the discussions of GreenLake with LLMs and being able to provide that, I think how does sustainability play into this? Because I mean, some of these models are taking 41 years of power of the average U.S. home to actually go and train just the model, one run of training the model. How does sustainability play into this in OpsRAM? Yeah, so Sustainability Dashboard is also on the HPE GreenLake platform. And you said it right, because of the customers using all of these AI models, the LLMs, it is consuming a lot of power in the data centers wherever they're running these AI models. And that power, if we can only give the visibility into the power wherever they're running this, and that is the first step. And that kind of visibility, of course, we need to be able to monitor HPE and other vendors' equipment as well, discover and monitor. And we are powering that using OpsRAM. You asked a question about what else OpsRAM can do. This is another area where OpsRAM is able to extract the information from a multi-vendor estate and multi-cloud estate and show it in the form of a sustainability report. How should we think about, this is a crowded space, the observability space, if I can just call it that. I know it's sort of observability plus. So how should we think about HPE's position and strategy? Obviously you want HPE on HPE, that should run better. But I hear all over it, so we're open. And there's a lot of other platforms out there. So how should we think about the ecosystem and the HPE on HPE? Yeah, so yes, you're right. This is a crowded space. But what stood out for us when we acquired OpsRAM is the ability to solve the customer challenges in a hybrid multi-cloud environment. You know, people are solving the problems either in a particular cloud or only on on-prem. Somebody who can go and bridge that gap is what OpsRAM brought to table for us, going hybrid multi-cloud, and bringing that multi-vendor capability is what we are adding on to that. You're saying it's the best product? It's the best product. Actually, that's exactly what our customers are saying. Okay, I was talking to Joe Peterson, who's a, she's an analyst, he's really an engineer, but she's in the analyst program, okay? And she was like, Dave, I'm really excited about OpsRAM. And we have this thing called SuperCloud. We may have talked about it in the past, you may have heard of it. But the whole idea is that it's an abstraction layer that lives across clouds and on-prem. And she said, I think this is, OpsRAM is like a super cloud. I don't think so. I think it's an enabler of super cloud. It allows you to have visibility and take action on infrastructure, deal with application performance, prioritize problems, on which I could build a super cloud platform. Is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah, I think, you know, the OpsRAM platform provides the complete enablement for the IT organization to kind of leverage whatever cloud that they would like to. And how much real estate that they wanted to put into the on-prem they can do. And this becomes the operations framework on top of it to enable whatever consumption that is needed. One of the key differentiators that OpsRAM brings to the table, which is very, very important to identify and acknowledge, is the capability of multi-tenancy and multi-tearing that allows service providers and channels to bring their own services on top of the consumption that they are doing. So going back to the super cloud, anybody can consume super cloud, but what happens, who is going to manage, how a channel can be enabled and OpsRAM brings that framework in addition to being a very powerful platform. But that's what I see, Rob. I see organizations building value on top of whether it's GreenLake or OpsRAM or across cloud. I mean, that is, we think what multi-cloud should have been. You know, and it really is multi-cloud, but we changed the name just because it's fun. Yeah, and I think someone, one of, I think it was in Antonio's keynote yesterday, he discussed how you're going to be able to get OpsRAM the traditional way through the SaaS delivered version, as well as through GreenLake. Is that a big push for you that be where your customers are and is that part of the channel play with this as well? Yeah, OpsRAM will continue to be available as a SaaS platform for both enterprise customers, as well as service providers and channel ecosystem. They can continue to consume OpsRAM as a standalone SaaS platform and it will be integrated through GreenLake. And as Ratha said, it's going to be available through GreenLake SaaS. Where's it fit in the organization? Sometimes I get confused. I see the P&L and how it's reported every quarter, but then there's platform and there's all kinds of other sort of non-line items. So where does it fit in the organization? Yeah, so HPE GreenLake platform is under the office of the CTO. And we work with various business units within HPE to bring the different services onto the platform. Now OpsRAM also fits in the office of the CTO. So Varma is part of our team. Okay, so you partner with the heads of the lines of business, whether it's the edge or storage or whomever servers, compute, I guess you call it, et cetera. And then they plug into GreenLake and then you enable that, you do the integration and make sure everything is working properly. That's exactly right. And then go to market. Yes, that's exactly right. And it seems like the part of the strategy of bringing OpsRAM in, like you said, week three as being an HPE employee, is to kind of help bring them in and acquaint them to HPE as well. And not really, I mean, did the same thing with Zerto when that was acquired. It kind of slowly became part of that group. Is that really the strategy you're looking at with OpsRAM as well? Is that, hey, let's not mess up a good thing that we have going here and make sure that we have that. Yeah, so we are making sure, first of all, we don't cause any disruption to our customers. So that's the plan. So whatever OpsRAM was providing before, that will continue as is without disruption. So the other question Joe was talking about, she's like, I'm not clear how they're going to monetize it. And I said, well, it seems to me that it's going to be bundled in and you get it as part of the platform so it makes GreenLake more attractive or possibly they'll unbundle it and sell it separately. What is the monetization strategy? So we, as you want to cover that? So, yeah, go ahead. So you can buy this as a SaaS, as Varma was mentioning. And we also have plans to bundle it with our other products, HPE products. And it's also being offered as part of the HPE services, which is HPE Complete Care and HPE GreenLake managed services as well. So it's yes, yes, and yes? Yes, yes. It could be bundled, it could be bought separately be part of a managed service. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. Excellent. All right, well guys, thanks so much. And congratulations on the acquisition and look forward to seeing the super progress down the road. Thank you. Thank you. All right, keep it right there everybody. Up next is the race to the edge. This is Dave Vellante for Rob Streche. You're watching the cubes coverage of HPE Discover 2023. We're right back right after this short break.